The Women Flap at Harvard

[HomeschoolrsRUs]

Stop apologizing: The women flap at Harvard
Amity Shlaes
January 24, 2005


Say you are a clever university president named Larry. You have an old friend, Marty, whose own institute is situated just down the road from you. You have a few problems at your university, and when you get an invitation to hash through them at Marty's, you zip right over. After all, the arguments at Marty's are provocative, intense and factual. There is nothing you love better than such rip-roaring exchanges. Besides, some good may come of it. Anything that is debatable is soluble. The Larry in this instance is, of course, Larry Summers of Harvard, former US Treasury secretary during the Clinton presidency. Marty is the economist Martin Feldstein of the National Bureau of Economic Research. And the conference, hosted by another economic eminence, Richard Freeman, did not turn out well for Mr Summers. For - as is known by now - one challenge that Mr Summers sought to address was that women today are not winning as many tenured posts in the "hard" sciences, such as advanced maths or physics, as might be expected in the post-feminist era. Another was that more males than females tend to score in the very top range of maths aptitude tests. Mr Summers also touched on the proposition that there might be a genetic difference between men and women when it came to performance in hard sciences.

Please read the rest here:
Amity Shlaes: Stop apologizing: The women flap at Harvard (http://www.townhall.com/columnists/amityshlaes/as20050124.shtml)

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In the immortal words of Arte Johnson . . . "Verrrrry Interesting!"

[PrezLeefun]

It must be said : Larry is an idiot!

[DesertFox]

Actually, no. Larry is right. The woman who got all huffy is the idiot.

From the article:

The trouble is not that Mr Summers is too self-satisfied. It is that Harvard is. Harvard - and US universities like it - tend to promulgate a set of views - global warming is a crisis; the US is to blame for the world's troubles; governments of developed nations ought to be large; and quotas or some form of affirmative action is required when it comes to the advancement of women and minorities. These same universities often shut out, or look away from, arguments that do not support these beliefs. ...

The reality - as most working adults know - is that modern universities and corporations are both sexist and sanctimoniously politically correct. Such are the nuances Mr Summers and colleagues might have been able to work through - if the prissier among them had not walked out and called The Boston Globe.